If the contents of the E<> are a number, that number is treated as the decimal Unicode value for the desired codepoint. For example:

Perl 6 makes considerable use of E<171> and E<187>.

You can also use explicit binary, octal, decimal, or hexadecimal numbers (using the Perl 6 notations for explicitly based numbers):

Perl 6 makes considerable use of E<0b10101011> and E<0b10111011>.
Perl 6 makes considerable use of E<0o253> and E<0o273>.
Perl 6 makes considerable use of E<0d171> and E<0d187>.
Perl 6 makes considerable use of E<0xAB> and E<0xBB>.

If the contents are not a number, they are interpreted as a Unicode character name (which is always upper-case), or else as an XHTML entity. For example:

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.8 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.